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Drinking Up Life In a Chinese Teahouse

IT is 8:30 on a late-summer morning in Chengdu, China -- warm, humid, the sunshine filtered through a mist as light as a watercolor wash. I am sitting in a teahouse in the heart of the People's Park. Today is Sunday, and I have nothing to do -- except drink tea and watch the people of the People's Park.

I pay 25 cents for a cup of stone-flower tea leaves, and a worker in white with a long-necked kettle pours steaming water into my cup. The black-green leaves spin with the water -- like people in a park in a crowded country, all of them moving, adding to the flavor. In the warm air, the steam quickly disappears.

There are perhaps 50 other people in the teahouse. It is a sprawling, high-roofed building without walls, set on the banks of a mossy lake; the teahouse is bordered by bowed willows and on the roof, the old clay tiles are green with age. With 50 people it feels empty. They are mostly older, in their 60's and 70's -- tables of old men who have brought their pet birds for a morning at the teahouse. The birds sit in bamboo cages hanging from the willow branches.

The old men talk -- slowly, lazily, the way old men everywhere talk, whether in Chinese teahouses or American barbershops. The birds in the cages chirp quietly, the sound nearly lost in the featherlike branches of the willow trees.

There is a slightly bitter bite to the stone-flower tea, an edge that barely numbs the tongue. I drink it slowly and lean back against my bamboo chair. It is a simple chair, slightly reclined, with large round armrests. It's the kind of chair that you can find in teahouses all over Chengdu -- or, for that matter, all over Sichuan Province, where the teahouse is an institution and the summers are long and hot and a bamboo chair feels cool against your back. There are teahouses all across a city like Chengdu, in parks, beside rivers, next to busy highways, and in their bamboo chairs, the customers all sit the same way: reclined, elbows on the armrests, legs sprawled out.

But there are workers even on this Sunday morning. A shoeshine man passes through with a pair of plastic slippers; he moves quickly in the growing crowd, kneeling to replace a customer's shoes with slippers. He then polishes the shoes at his bench beneath the branches of a willow tree; it is the most pleasant spot in the park, beside the lake, under the tree, but he keeps his head down and polishes. The late-morning customers keep him busy, because as the day passes the clientele becomes younger and wealthier, businessmen with beepers and leather shoes that need to be shined.

They are less interested in having their fortunes told, and the fortuneteller -- an old man dressed in blue, a wispy goatee dangling to his chest -- has few takers. Likewise, the two ear pickers have no customers and spend much of the early morning in bamboo chairs, staring out at the lake. Occasionally, one will rise and walk through the teahouse, and as he walks he carries his cotton swabs and metal picks in two neat quivers. He clicks the picks together steadily, to attract attention, but the ear picker is a fixture of Chengdu teahouses and nobody seems to notice.

The steady clicking is only part of the general hum, the sounds spinning like tea leaves in a cup: muddled conversations, the buzz of cicadas in the willows, the soft rush of water being poured from long-necked kettles. I finish the first cup, then the second, and then I begin a third. With each refill, the tea weakens slightly; my tongue is no longer numbed. But the taste is still pleasant, and as I drink, I am reminded of a Chinese legend, a tea story:

In the sixth century, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma came to China from India. Once, while meditating, he fell asleep, and this lapse so enraged him that he tore off his eyelids: no eyelids, no more sleep.

The eyelids fell, and where they fell, two bushes soon grew. Bodhidharma put leaves of the bushes in boiled water, and when he drank the water he found he was more alert. His meditating improved. Tea-drinking was introduced to China.

It's not until nearly 11 A.M. that the ear pickers get any business. The first customer, a middle-aged well-dressed man, sits calmly while the picker works, switching between different-sized picks and swabs, peering close into the man's ears and moving carefully. He spends 30 minutes cleaning them, first the left then the right, and other customers begin to appear, moving out to the ear pickers' chairs beside the lake.

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Both workers keep busy, and then two more appear, and between the four of them, they share the dirty ears of the teahouse. The customers sit calmly, all of them wearing the same inscrutable expression that I always see on the faces of Sichuanese who are having their ears picked: no sign of pain, no sign of pleasure. The expression is quiet, peaceful, emptily thoughtful; perhaps it is the one human expression that means I am having my ears cleaned.

Today is a typical, cloudy Chengdu summer day, and there's a certain timeless quality as morning shifts without notice into afternoon. There is no sunshine, no shadows shrinking or growing, nothing by which to gauge the time. Sometimes, I close my eyes and simply listen to the hum of the teahouse; it too is a timeless sound, the sound of people relaxing, and there are moments when it seems so steady and reassuring that it's hard to imagine it ending.

But I know it once was halted, during the Cultural Revolution, when the Government realized that people who sat in teahouses often talked about politics. For years, Chengdu's teahouses were closed down, including the one in the People's Park, and though they eventually reopened, many say they have never recovered.

THIS afternoon, though, the crowd reaches 300. More and more young people arrive, always in large groups, the women dressed nicely, the men with beepers and cigarettes. They play cards and laugh loudly, telling stories; most of the older people have left.

I sit alone, nursing the same tea leaves that I brought this morning and occasionally, somebody comes over to practice English. In mid-afternoon, a young architecture student from Chongqing stops to talk. He tells me that he will finish school this year, and I ask him what he would most like to design. He pauses to think -- a budding architect in a country where buildings sprout like bamboo shoots, where for more than a decade the economy has had an annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent a year -- and then he answers. ''I'd like,'' he says ''to build parks.''

In late afternoon, the teahouse begins to empty. The ground is covered with the day's refuse -- nut shells, fruit rinds, chopsticks, cigarette butts, plastic foam bowls. An old man wanders through, looking for bottles and cans. Most of the bamboo chairs are empty, and the workers begin to stack them. Soon, the shoeshine man and the ear pickers pitch in, stacking chairs and sweeping the floor, because the day's business is over.

I am tired of tea. It is 6 P.M. and the sun is fading; there are 70 people left, and they drift away steadily, quietly, moving out into the busy streets of the city.

As it grows dark, there are mostly lovers in the teahouse -- standing hand-in-hand, looking out on the water. The lake, like any lake, is prettier with the darkness, and I watch it for a while. In China, solitude can be fleeting and I sit quietly, enjoying the evening.

At 8:30, there are only seven customers left, and at last, I leave. I have spent 12 hours in the teahouse, and as I go I pass one of the ear pickers. He is with his daughter, who is perhaps 4, and in the darkness he is washing her in a fountain. He washes her gently; she laughs and plays with the water. The ear picker smiles as I pass, and the child waves, her father prompting her to say: ''Bye-bye! Bye-bye!''

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A version of this article appears in print on May 18, 1997, on Page 5005037 of the National edition with the headline: Drinking Up Life In a Chinese Teahouse. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe